Blog

GI member Gustavo Tondello successfully defended his PhD entitled "Dynamic Personalization of Gameful Interactive Systems". Congratulations Dr. Tondello!

Tondello's research builds on what we know about gamification—the application of game elements in non-gaming contexts. He explores how user qualities can shape their gameful experience, how developers and designers are currently gamifying systems, and whether this can be improved.

On Tuesday, June 25th the GI's Executive Director and Chair of the UWaterloo Ethics Technology and Social Impact (ETSI) Council, Dr. Neil Randall, was part of the panel "Wo(man) and machine—who makes the decisions and why?" discussing the ethics and future of artificial intelligence (AI).

Marvin Pafla, GI and Collaborative Systems Laboratory (CSL) member and Master’s student in System Design Engineering, presented in this year’s Canadian HCI and Graphics Interface Conference in Kingston, Ontario, May 28-31. His paper “Jumping the Bandwagon: Overcoming Social Barriers to Public Display Use” explores why digital, public displays have low interaction rates.

Shout out to CSL Director, Stacey Scott, who was invited as a keynote speaker at this year’s conference!

The Critical Media Lab (CRIME Lab), directed by Marcel O'Gorman, hosted a Research Showcase on April 3, 2019 entitled "Infrastructure at Play". At the showcase, GI faculty member Lai-Tze Fan and GI English Graduate student members AC Atienza, Lillian A.

The Games Insititute (GI) Game Jam takes place every term. But, once a year, the event becomes a part of something larger: every Winter, the GI Game Jam becomes a satelite event for the internationally renowned Global Game Jam.

Fall 2018, Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs launched the first ever GRADflix competition. Graduate students were invited to create a 60-second video, moving slide show, or animation about their research. Entries were judged based on communication, creativity and visual impact, and technical quality.

Several members of the Games Institute and the UW Touchlab participated in the 13th annual ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces & Spaces (ISS) in Tokyo, Japan from November 25-28, 2018. The research they presented ranged from work on multi-touch surfaces and interactive 3D spaces to optimizing how health care providers collect feedback from patients.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a popular AAA game set in a post-post apocalyptic world where you play as a female protagonist, Aloy, and use a focus - an Augmented Reality-style interface - to help you battle mechanical animals. The game set the stage for the conversation, but the spotlight was on the panelists.

Alexandra Orlando, an alum of the Games Institute and a former Editor in Chief for First Person Scholar, maintains a YouTube channel for academically-oriented games criticism. When she's not working on video essays, she works as freelance writer.

How can games guide us, change us, and help us?

This was the question that left me speechless, simply because I wasn’t sure where to begin or even how to fully answer it. The question was the first of many posed by an eager group of Mexican exchange students visiting the GI.